Herald of the Sun

Planetdune

<Tranquil Sanctuary>

(EU) Silvermoon

Human Holy Paladin

Herald of the Sun

I was born in the early 80's and started working with computers towards the end of that decade, first on a Commodore 64 and later on the Amiga 500. My love for gaming I owe to my father who had boxes filled with floppies holding all kinds of treasures. I battled kobolds and drow in my first dungeon crawler Eye of the Beholder. Visited other galaxies in Dune and had plenty just another turn moments in Civilization 1. My Amiga was my best companion. Around this time a friend of mine had a NES and while Super Mario Bros 1 or TMNT were nice to play, his library of a dozen games couldn't hold a candle to my collection. In retrospective, his games were originals and mine were X-copied but I didn't give a hoot. Time moved ahead and I missed the early DOS era. Games as Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Commander Keen and other ID Software titles passed me by. It must have been around 93, 94 before I really made the jump to a Pentium 100. We did have a 486DX66 but it was mostly used by my dad for non game related.. things.. no idea looking back today what he actually did with the machine.. all I cared about was "it wasn't great for gaming". In a way neither was my P100. I could see potential when I booted the very first game I ever bought myself. Tomb Raider 1. That game really made a impression on my young self, the atmosphere, the loneliness... Lara.. I could even press the function keys to switch to "ultra cool looking mode" (back then I had no clue it was actually changing resolution). But when I did my frame rate tanked hard.. so it was like watching pretty pictures of Lara's 1 polygonal breasts! Tomb Raider was soon followed by Carmageddon and Civilization 2.

All great games but it was when I spend all my pocket money (from about a year) on a brand new shiny 3Dfx Voodoo 2 featuring 12 megabytes of video ram that my life changed. It was magic.. I had no clue how it worked but I knew darn well that Glide was the stuff dreams were made off. No technology ever since made my jaw drop as that card did. Going from years of software rendering to full hardware acceleration just blew my mind. Suddenly I could play Tomb Raider the way I saw it at a friends house on his Playstation 1. Carmageddon's only official addon, the Splat Pack, had a patch for the original game to support 3Dfx. It was gaming bliss. I fell in love with Star Trek as I got addicted to The Next Generation series, which meant I had to have the game based on it, "A Final Unity". Which was a great adventure game and one of the last Dos games I remember playing before making the switch to Windows95. More years passed by and so did more computer rigs come and go, all my spare change went into hardware. On the software front, I discovered that there was something called "the IPX protocol". Before long I was always on the lookout for places to hook my PC on the local area network. A friends place, the local computer club.. I wanted to get my hands on every game I could get my hands on. Compilation CD's as Twilight started making the rounds and eventually I got my own subscription from those Dutch wonder kids.

It was around this time that a little something called the internet came along. I was hooked ever since I proudly showed my dad how I downloaded my very first Winamp skin. He was less impressed by the fact that took me almost half an hour on a metered by the minute 56k connection. But there was no stopping the hands of time. ADSL came along and forever changed my world. My computer was downloading non stop. Checking isonews.com multiple times a day to see what games were released by my favorite cracking groups. This became a addiction and the cabinet quickly filled with burned CD's. We are talking late nineties, early nillies by now and classics such as Unreal, Deus Ex, Gothic 2 and Morrowind were released. It was a good time to be alive. 2005 also saw my introduction to the game that had and still has a big impact on me.. World of Warcraft. I started playing in late Vanilla and quickly noticed on the character creation screen that my original nickname DJK was not going to cut it in this weird massive multiplayer online game. As my love for Star Trek was only equaled by my fondness of Dune, I entered the first name that came to mind. Planetdune. A dumb name to be sure, but, it was only going to be temporary. That is, until I became addicted to the game.. currently.. 13 years later I am anticipating the next expansion, Battle for Azeroth to arrive. Over the years I noticed no one on earth was silly enough to use a name as Planetdune as his username and thus it sorta stuck.

With the arrival of Half Life 2 and more importantly, Steam, my interest in downloading warez and collecting physical discs diminished. With, today, over 5000 games on my Steam account I own legit a lot of those illegal copies I once obtained. In a way I became to lazy to torrent (which took over the FTP/FXP way of old) releases and, as a grownup with a disposable income, I just buy whatever I want to play. Which, today is surprisingly not that much.. I play a lot of Blizzard games. World of Warcraft and Hearthstone daily, Starcraft 2 and Diablo 3 in bursts, some Rocket League and at times a bit of Unreal Tournament, the original. Besides those I check out something on the side from time to time but usually lose interest fast. In short, gone are the days where I feverishly check the internet every single day scooping up new releases. I am still a gamer, I couldn't miss my PC but the nostalgic days of I-Seek-You-Ing or Whipping the Llama's Ass are gone. I'm not that fond of all the mobiles and socials these days.. but as grandpa once said: "I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary". Age changes things and the past never comes back. All we can do is look forward and appreciate what was and what will be. My son is almost two and the day will come when he is going to try and dazzle me with all kinds of new flashy modern games.. I'll nod, boot up UT99 and frag soms bots on Deck16.